Messages

Hey all, thought I'd chuck a begging message in here in case one of you has a spare one of either of these propping up a short table leg (and because I'm sick of waiting to see if they'll pop up on ebay...)

I'm looking for:

A Zenith 'Never Trust a Hippy' badge
One of these Zenith promotional bookmarks (http://www.2000adcollectables.com/book.JPG)


Decent prices paid.  I may be desperate but I'm not a millionaire though so don't go mad


Thanks!

It also claims that TV Comic, Countdown and TV Action are owned by Reach plc / the Mirror Group.

For what it's worth this probably isn't a huge coup for the Mirror Group as nearly all of the strips in those comics (I think?) were licensed, and are almost certainly owned by whoever owns the property itself.  The Thunderbirds strips for example will be owned by whoever owns the Thunderbirds property (ITV? Some sort of Gerry Anderson holding group? I dunno) etc. etc.

Same applies to Rebellion's recently acquired Look-In unfortunately.  We're there *any* strips in Look-in that weren't adaptations of some TV property or another??

I suppose the (slightly) silver lining here is that Rebellion are certainly the best placed to publish any reprints of those Look-in strips should they want to, but they'd for sure have to enter into a new licensing agreement with whoever the owners are.

Chanced upon this thread looking for some info on who owns Metalzoic (DC, thanks for that) and saw some other stuff come up where I might be able to help with some answers.  Nothing definitive of course (I'm not a copyright lawyer, thank god), but just some info I've come across from researching this stuff over the years.

Not going to get into conentious 2000AD strips (Summer Magic, Zenith) as that's been done to death elsewhere and ultimately an issue between Rebellion and the creator's involved.  Also, all the old IPC/Egmont 'pre-1970 plus characters from Buster' stuff has now been resolved with Rebellion buying it all I think?

The other stuff though...

* Licenced Dredd games/books/comics etc. - Standard practice across the industry - certainly today, most likely in the past as well - is that the licensor (in this case Rebellion, who would also retrospectively own anything licensed by IPC) owns the copyright on any licensed works, with the licensee's interest lasting only as long as the period agreed in the original contract between the two parties.  You can see that most clearly with Star Wars comics (and, more recently Conan) produced by Dark Horse.  They're ultimately owned by Lucasfilm/Disney, so now their licensing agreement with Dark Horse has expired, they're free to publish them wherever else they like (in this case, under the Marvel Comics banner). 

For a much more obscure example of this see the Grant Morrison/Ian Gibson Steed & Mrs Peel series, co-published by Atomeka and Eclipse (what a nightmare *that* would be to resolve if you had to untangle their affairs) but ultimately owned by the current license holders of The Avengers TV show, StudioCanal, who were the only one's Boom! Comics needed to seek permission from in order to republish the series (scanned from the old comics, smooth move Boom) a few years back.

All of which is to say, pretty much any non-Rebellion Dredd content you can think of is almost certainly owned by Rebellion, but may be subject to an ongoing licensing agreement with someone else.  Phew!

* - For properties not ultimately owned by Rebellion, but published under license by them (or IPC) - Dan Dare, Urban Strike etc. etc. - see above; the strips are almost certainly owned by the rights holder and a specific licensing agreement would need to be struck to reprint them.  This would also apply retrospectively to all of the Eagle content that the Dan Dare Corporation apparently bought by accident (I'd love to read more info on what happened there...)

* - The Comic Relief Comic is a copyright nightmare, a miracle it ever got published in the first place to be honest.  Its not immediately clear who owns the story itself, but you'd not be able to reprint it without  licensing agreements with probably dozens of different rights-holders.  Don't hold your breath on ever seeing that one again.

* - V For Vendetta was sold to DC by Moore, Lloyd and Dez Skinn back in the 1980's, under similar/the same terms as Watchmen - a decent sales royalty and once it goes out of print (i.e. never) we might let you have it back, but probably not.  The rest of the Warrior strips (apart from Marvelman) are owned by the creators, as was Skinn's intention from the get-go (see, he's not all bad...)

* - Miracleman (the character) is now owned by Marvel, who bought the rights from Mick Anglo.  The story Skinn told for years about buying the rights from the Official Receiver was a load of rubbish (hmm, maybe he is all bad...) and the strip was for all intents and purposes created under a (legal) assumption that the character was in the public domain.  Whether it was or not, everyone involved agreed that the best way to resolve the years and years of litigation surrounding it was to assume Anglo still held the rights and for Marvel to buy them off him.  The question of who owns the rights to the actual work done for Warrior and Eclipse is much more complicated and (as far as I know) still being ironed out between the creators and Marvel; just one of the myriad reasons why Gaiman's conclusion to the series is still yet to appear.

Hope that's cleared something up for someone, anyway

Yup, those are all the Brendan concept images present in the volume, and it makes me even more convinced the remaining images mentioned above are by a different uncredited artist.

I'd bet my bottom dollar on it.

Great volume nevertheless.

Dunk!

The sketches you mention are all Grant Morrison's own (uncredited) work, as is the Warhead sketch that appeared in the Complete book (and might make it's way into the new Phase II hardcover).  Apparently there was £200 in the kitty to pay Brendan McCarthy for his design work and once that ran out, Grant and Steve were on their own.  I don't think they did too badly for £200 though